Top stories concerning British Isles ancestral research from Irish born Scottish based professional family historian, author and tutor Chris Paton. Feel free to quote from this blog, but please credit British GENES if you do so. Should you wish to get in touch, contact me at christopherpaton @ tiscali.co.uk. Happy hunting!

The new page no longer divides collections up into those for 'Northern Ireland' and 'Ireland' (i.e. the Republic), but simply lists them all under a new gateway entitled All Our Irish Collections with various drop-down tags to various collections. On the one hand this makes life a lot easier, because Ancestry was occasionally geographically challenged when it came to placing Irish records online, with some collections being listed under one jurisdiction when in fact they were all Ireland based, north and south - so I think this is a good thing. On the other hand, the page does look a bit more bland, but the key thing is functionality, and so far, so good when playing with it.